Karin & Rashid: Street Fighter V Hands-On Preview

Fists of Fury

Street Fighter V is quite an anticipated title. The game is growing to include quite a diverse roster with the inclusion of series staples, fan favourites alongside the new and returning characters. Karin and Rashid, two recently revealed characters were playable during Tokyo Game Show, so we took ’em for a spin to see how the game plays and how these two fit into the well established series.

Before I get into the two featured characters I want to take a little time to discuss the game itself and some of the stages we punched and kicked our way around. There were four main maps to choose from, but the New Zealand based stage quickly became a favourite of mine. The quirky mix of natural beauty and sheep filled stereotypes created a memorable and quite hilarious stage with a huge lake and crazy animals competing for attention around the fight. All the stages were quite detailed with a lot of character, definitely cool backgrounds to do battle in front of. Even so, they never drew too much focus, especially in the heat of battle, complementing the game well.The real focus of Street Fighter is the fighting itself. As stellar as ever, Street Fighter V’s combat systems are immediately familiar to anyone who’s picked up and played a fighting game, with the trademark complexity that makes these games so competitive and engaging. The visuals that accompany the punches and kicks were one of my favourite things about the game – like ink dabs and motion lines right out of a comic, suiting the stylised look of the world. Classic characters like Chun Li, Ryu and Cami were still a lot of fun to play, but it was the new roster additions that stood out in the preview build.The big Street Fighter V announcement out of Tokyo Game Show was the re-introduction of Karin, a fighter not seen since Street Fighter Alpha 3, totally redesigned with a new look and moveset for the latest instalment. Karin is classed as a rekka style character, with those moves available to you once you activate her V-Trigger.

She’s quite a powerful character with a lot of potential for a lot of variety and capable of getting around characters that rely heavily on zoning. The drawback comes in the form of the time it takes to activate some of her more powerful moves. Quick characters will be able to get in hits and cancel these moves if you’re not careful, but the pay off is some devastatingly powerful attacks and combos.Rashid is a brand new character to the series, with quite a cool design. He’s fast and deadly to play with the ability to summon powerful wind based attacks and even a tornado. After playing both with and against him i found it’s very important to not give him too much space or a big opening, the rapid nature of his attacks can easily chew through large chunks of health before you even know it.

His V-Trigger is a powerful jump kick that can autocorrect to attack from behind should your foe dodge it. There’s a lot of moves you can mix in to combo with the kick, allowing for deadly attacks, especially punishing against poor blocking. He’s quite a good character that was pretty enjoyable to play, especially for fans of speedy attackers.

All in all these two characters are quite welcome combatants in Street Fighter V’s line up. Capcom seems to be nailing it with this latest instalment, allowing even a more casual fan like myself to jump in and have some fun. The visual style of the game combined with some really snappy gameplay made me a lot more keen to pick up the game than I originally was, which is certainly a good sign.

Street Fighter V is set for release in March 2016 for Playstation 4 and PC.